Patrick Griffin, Ph.D., has dedicated his career to understanding the molecules of life in pursuit of treatments for cancer, diabetes, osteoporosis, obesity and more.
By developing technologies that reveal some of the smallest structures of life, Griffin and his team at The Herbert Wertheim UF Scripps Institute for Biomedical Innovation & Technology have worked with dozens of collaborators to pursue more effective and safe precision medicines for incurable diseases.
The Big Picture
Our bodies are made of trillions of cells. These cells must communicate with each other and our brain to respond to changing needs including growth, stress and reproduction. Chemical messengers including hormones provide these signals, which activate proteins called nuclear receptors. These nuclear receptors control gene expression and alter which of our genes get transcribed at any given moment, dictating whether we fall asleep, crave sugar, grow taller, gain strength or fight an infection. They can even suppress development of cancer. Griffin is an expert on the structure and function of proteins, especially nuclear receptors, helping define their role in disease, and helping make medicines that influence their activity.
Who is Patrick Griffin, Ph.D.?
Griffin is a professor of molecular medicine and the scientific director of The Wertheim UF Scripps Institute. Griffin is internationally recognized for his drug development expertise, and his advances that allow scientists to study protein dynamics. Trained in biophysical chemistry, he has spent the last two decades helping build the Wertheim UF Scripps campus. Earlier, he worked in biotechnology and at the pharmaceutical company Merck, as its senior director of chemistry. There, he helped discover a drug used to stabilize blood sugar, as well as a treatment for cystic fibrosis.
Zeroing In
Studying nuclear receptors has proven exceptionally difficult until recently, due to their low abundance in cells and their inherent dynamics. Griffin helped develop a technique called hydrogen deuterium mass spectrometry, or HDX-MS to solve the challenge of studying disordered proteins. By swapping hydrogens with heavier deuterium, scientists can use special mass spec machines to determine stability or disorder within proteins. With this information, the scientists can computationally model the structure, shape and dynamics of the proteins. This helps them predict how they will function in a living organism, how they might cause disease, and how modifying them with a drug-like molecule could affect their function to reverse the disease process. It has become a very important tool for designing precision medicines.
Why it Matters
Many diseases are caused not just by the presence of the wrong protein, but by proteins behaving unexpectedly, such as folding incorrectly. They may also be modified in odd ways, fail to connect to DNA or other related proteins, or become too active. These subtle changes can make it difficult for scientists to design effective therapies. Griffin’s research focuses on mapping those changes in detail, allowing for more accurate drug targeting, and reducing unwanted side effects for therapies in metabolic disease, inflammatory and degenerative disease, and cancer.
Professional Impact
Griffin’s work doesn’t stop at the bench. He partners with chemists, biologists and clinicians to ensure discoveries are translated into therapeutic candidates. He also mentors and teaches aspiring scientists.
Griffin’s collaborative work in developing inhibitors for non-muscle myosin II, a protein linked to cancer cell movement, is a prime example of how understanding protein structure can lead to breakthrough cancer therapies.
On the Horizon
Griffin’s future work is focusing on expanding computationally assisted structural studies, to help predict how proteins will respond to new treatments. He is also developing dual-action drug compounds—molecules that can target multiple disease pathways at once, making treatments more effective for complex conditions like glioblastoma, diabetes, chronic kidney disease and inflammatory diseases. By unraveling the secrets of protein dynamics, Griffin is helping transform how scientists design new drugs. Griffin’s research is paving the way for faster, more precise treatments, offering hope for patients with cancer, metabolic disorders and more.
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twenty years of discovery
A Proud Legacy of Discovery
Read about the innovators of The Wertheim UF Scripps Institute and their outsized contributions to science and to people awaiting cures.